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Class 
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ESSAYS IN LENT 



ESSAYS IN LENT 



HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 




NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

681 Fifth Avenue 












Copyright, 1915 

By THE OUTLOOK PUBLISHING ( ' >MI'AN Y 

Copyright, 1919 

By E. P. DUTTON A COMPANY 



l// Rights Reserved 


in mn. 


wf*n*>* 


an • wts 



Printed in the United States of America 



1 1.00 



PUBLISHER'S NOTE 



This series of beautiful 
little essays originally ap- 
peared in the columns of 
The Outlook, of which at 
that time (1915) Mr. Mabie 
was one of the editors. They 
are now issued in book form 
with the generous consent 
of the proprietors of The 
Outlook. 



CONTENTS 



The Battle of Life . . .11 

The Old Fight 17 

The Inward Punishment . . 22 

The Latest Temptation . . 28 

The Denial of Life ... 36 

The Price of the Soul . . 43 

Good Friday 51 

The Victory 59 



ESSAYS IN LENT 



THE BATTLE OF LIFE 




| HE Lenten season gains 
every year a wider ob- 
servance, not only be- 
cause many churches have always 
observed it, but also because 
Christians of every name feel the 
need of remembering the great 
experience which it commemorates. 
No recorded experience has been 
studied with greater seriousness or 
deeper reverence. Those to whom 
Christ is the Master of life and 
those to whom he is one among 
11 



12 ESSAYS IX LENT 

several great religious teachers are 
agreed that the forty days in the 
wilderness hold a unique place in 
the history of the human spirit. 
There have been many interpreta- 
tions of the mysterious happenings 
in that lonely vigil, and its sym- 
bolic meaning has grown as patient 
and reverent thought has striven 
to penetrate the solitude in which 
the man who called himself the 
Son of God as well as the Son of 
Man went through a struggle 
which cleared his vision, set his will 
immovably to fulfill a mission of 
divine helpfulness, and sent him in 
radiant strength on the road to 
Calvary and to the morning of the 
resurrection. Henceforth there 



ESSAYS IN LENT 13 

was for him perfect union with 
the Father; and unclouded faith 
in the heavenly vision kept him 
courageous amid the misery of the 
world, and tranquil and serene in 
the presence of death. 

In that lonely struggle the one 
fact that stands out with tragic 
and splendid distinctness is that 
Christ was fighting for his soul. 
The temptations which assail men 
at every stage of the journey and 
make life a long battle met him 
on the very threshold and chal- 
lenged him at the very start to 
prove his worthiness to be the 
redeemer of the race. He who was 
to save the souls of men must first 
save his own soul; he who was to 



14 ESSAYS IN LENT 

win the battle of life for others 
must first win it for himself. 

It was a clear and definite issue 
that was fought out in the wilder- 
ness; it has been fought out every 
day since; it is the one funda- 
mental issue in history. It is often 
concealed by other and more 
obvious issues ; there are those who 
deny that there is any such issue; 
what is called civilization seen is at 
times to have disproved its exist- 
ence until civilization suddenly 
gives way and men find themselves 
standing on the edges of appalling 
abysses, and realize that under the 
fairest landscape there she]) to- 
day, as there slept a thousand 
years ago, the forces that rend and 



ESSAYS IN LENT 15 

wreck in thirty seconds the work 
of thirty centuries. 

Time and wealth and beauty 
and the growth of order have 
changed the form of the age-old 
and unending battle which all men 
must fight to keep their souls alive. 
It is a beautiful world; it is 
crowded with absorbing interests; 
it is a better world than it used 
to be because more men and 
women are fighting the battle for 
their souls; in the future it will 
help them through wiser laws and 
more wholesome conditions to 
make the fight. But to the end 
of the world every man and 
woman must fight for the soul. No 
change in institutions and laws, no 



16 ESSAYS IN LENT 

refinement of ways of living, no 
loveliness which art can bring to 
humanity, will ever win the battle 
once for all. Every age must fight 
for its soul as this age is fighting 
to-day, and every man and woman 
must pass through that struggle. 
It is inherent in the very nature 
of a stage of life which, through 
temptation and struggle, offers us 
the strength and purity which 
alone make God and heaven 
credible and real. 




II 

THE OLD FIGHT 

OCIETY has become 
partially Christianized ; 
there is now no authority 
on earth which can compel men to 
choose between loyalty to their 
faith and death; there are no 
longer pagan gods to whom Chris- 
tians must offer sacrifices or go 
into the arena. There are martyrs 
in every country in the world, but 
martyrdom is no longer drama- 
tized; the victim dies after long 
suffering hidden from the world. 

17 



18 ESSAYS IN LENT 

There is no longer a place of 
torment luridly pictured and of a 
visible and haunting terror; and 
many people seem to think that 
there is no longer any hell, and 
that men can now live as they 
choose, with no thought of a 
broken law, a righteous judge, and 
an unescapable penalty impar- 
tially imposed and inevitably 
borne. And yet what men call 
hell, a place or state of remorse, 
of moral degeneration, of agony 
of mind and body, was never bo 
obvious and tragic a reality as to- 
day. It is no longer accessary to 
open Dante's "Inferno" to find it; 
it is only necessary to unfold the 
morning newspaper. Its first 



ESSAYS IN LENT 19 

page is crowded with reports of 
the misery which follows fast and 
sure on every violation of the laws 
of life. Disease and death wait, 
not as specters, but as the execu- 
tioners of the laws of science on 
every offender; murder in every 
possible form is so familiar to the 
reporter that unless circumstances 
or persons are unusual it finds 
only a brief space; men fleeing 
from justice and women from dis- 
grace are figures so familiar that 
they attract scanty attention; loss 
of integrity, betrayal of honor, 
blighting of home, loss of reputa- 
tion and influence, are part of the 
history of the day. 

And with whatever bravado 



20 ESSAYS IN LENT 

men and women faee these penal- 
ties, sooner or later, if one fol- 
lows their careers, the inevitable 
tragedy is revealed. Unless and 
until there comes a place and an 
hour of repentance, these unhappy 
victims of passion, violators of 
honor, betrayers of their own 
souls, are in a hell of which Dante 
drew but a faint picture. 

The man who was asked if he 
believed in hell, and answered that 
he was in it, brought out clearly 
a radical change of thought. The 
ignorant or literal-minded once 
thought of hell as a place of fiery 
torment prepared by an offended 
God for the future punishment of 
evil-doers; we know that it is an 



ESSAYS IN LENT 21 

experience of suffering involved in 
the very structure of our natures, 
which begins here and now, and is 
an expression of divine love. The 
suffering of which men think when 
they think of hell is of to-day; it 
waits for no future, it begins now, 
and it will continue until the 
offender is purified. 

The issue which every man must 
face is precisely what it was when 
Christ faced it in the wilderness: 
Shall a man save his soul ? Words 
and symbols have changed, but the 
battle of life is as inevitable, as 
fateful, as desperate, as it was a 
thousand years ago. 



Ill 

THE INWARD PUNISH- 
MENT 



ORDS, symbols, and 
forms of thought have 
i Km changed; but the truths 
behind them remain 
A flaming hell no 



and facts 
unchanged, 
longer terrifies men; and heaven, 
expressed by material symbols, no 
longer inspires them to holy living. 
But heaven and hell are all the 
more real because we largely 
fashion them ourselves. That is to 
say, they are not waiting for us, 

22 



ESSAYS IN LENT 23 

arbitrarily created as places of 
reward or punishment according 
to the deeds done in the body; 
rather we have been so fashioned 
that by the play of the laws which 
God has written in our natures we 
not only decide whither we shall 
go, but what shall await us. We 
no longer say we shall be im- 
mortal; we know that we are im- 
mortal. Heaven and hell are not 
only outside, but within us ; and no 
man can go to either destination 
until he has made himself ready 
by inward preparation. The good 
man who accidentally found him- 
self in hell would not really be 
there; and a bad man who might 
stray into heaven would find it 



24 ESSAYS IN LENT 

hell by sheer force of contrast 
between himself and liis surround- 
ings. 

The moral law written in our 
natures is more inescapable and 
inexorable than when it was 
written on tables of stone. No 
man can escape because he keeps 
the record himself. M. Bergson's 
little book on "Dreams" is full of 
fearful intimations of immortality. 
It tells us that nothing we have 
ever said, thought, felt, or done is 
forgotten; that we carry with us 
an ineffaceable record which time 
cannot blur and death will not 
erase. Shakespeare repeated long 
ago in dramatic form what the 
Bible has enforced with the noblest 



ESSAYS IN LENT 25 

imagery and the most startling 
distinctness : that what a man is he 
has made himself; that his past 
travels with him; that, while his 
sins may be forgotten, their effects 
cannot be eradicated by the most 
bitter and searching repentance. 
The promise of Christ is that he 
shall deliver us from our sins, not 
from their consequences. 

Many people in the world do 
not think of the law until they see 
the constable or policeman. They 
either lack imagination or the 
spiritual sense which makes a man 
aware that, however peaceful the 
day may be and however beautiful 
the landscape, there are laws 
written in the world about him 



26 ESSAYS IN LENT 

which arc full of tragic possibilities 
if he disobeys. 

The world is full of moral dis- 
order because man is free: but 
there is no moral anarchy, because 
no lawbreaker escapes. The most 
awful quality of the hell of which 
men know and in which many of 
them live to-day is its disintegrat- 
ing, benumbing, paralyzing effect 
Most of us have seen some man 
begin, in the flush of a vigorous 
manhood, to violate the law of 
temperance; we have seen his will 
slowly yield, his habits interfere 
with his efficiency, his ability 
decline, the shadow creep over his 
home, his friends regard him with 
ineffectual sympathy, physical de- 



ESSAYS IN LENT 27 

generacy set in, until finally he 
becomes an unorganized mass of 
matter without conscience or will 
or capacity, returning to the ele- 
ments before he is physically dead. 
There is nothing more appalling 
or revolting, and the most awful 
aspect of it is that the man himself 
does not know what is happening. 
He grows less and less sensitive, 
and the more repulsive he becomes 
the less he realizes the death in life 
which everyone else sees in him. 
He lives in hell. At the begin- 
ning that fact may strike home to 
him, but as time goes on he is less 
and less conscious that he is a lost 
soul. 



IV 

THE LATEST TEMPTA- 
TION 

KJ j B fl|HE sense of something 

IcH iplll sm ' stur an, l malign in 
ggjjglgfl the world seems to have 
come to men as soon as they began 
to see the world and to think about 
what they saw. And with primi- 
tive men to think of an evil 
influence was to personify it, and 
so the devil entered into human 
thought and has remained to this 
day. He has assumed many forms 
and worn many costumes; he has 
18 



ESSAYS IN LENT 29 

been brutal, hideous, repulsive, 
terrifying; and he has been 
urbane, polished, insinuating. He 
has been an incarnation of ugli- 
ness, foulness, corruption; and he 
has been a well-bred, cultivated 
man of the world. He has been 
a nightmare of terror; a Satan 
born an angel and led astray by 
ambition ; and he has been Mephis- 
topheles, a fascinating companion, 
offering to make men as gods in 
knowledge and freedom to will 
and to do as they pleased. 

In all these forms the spirit of 
evil has borne himself according to 
the fashion of the time; and has 
expressed in figure and bearing 
the thought of the age. To the 



30 ESSAYS IX LENT 

savage as well as to those who have 
gone a part of the way toward 
civilization he has been a hideous 
and dreaded enemy to be resisted 
and made powerless by charms 
and incantations; in the Norse 
mythology he is the god of fire, 
disintegrating and destructive; 
from the towers of Notre Dame he 
looks down on Paris with a sinister 
and malign sneer; in Marlowe's 
"Faustus" he is a melodramatic 
devil, crude, vulgar, and without 
disguise; in "Paradise Lost" he is 
a great spirit fallen from heaven 
and clothed with a certain tragic 
dignity; in Goethe's masterpiece 
he is a specious, insinuating temp- 
ter, an actor in the drama of life 



ESSAYS IN LENT 31 

whose part is to suggest a greater 
freedom to men and to promise 
that which life cannot give — 
supreme and abiding satisfaction 
in power, knowledge, and pleasure 
secured without discipline and 
without the restraint of law. 

The devil, in a word, has ceased 
to wear the face of a demon and 
the garb of an outlaw; he has 
become respectable; he knows the 
moral and social conventions, and, 
so long as it serves his purposes, 
observes them; he sometimes goes 
to church; he no longer shudders 
behind his mask when the cross 
confronts him, nor does he shrink 
from the test of holy water. He 
is no longer repulsive to the eye, 



32 ESSAYS IX LENT 

but he is more malignant and 
hideous spiritually than was the 
devil that tempted our ancestors; 
he no longer wears his nature in 
his face and proclaims his calling 
by his dress, and he is therefore 
more dangerous. To the earlier 
generations he was an open foe; 
to us he is a secret enemy; he has 
always been the father of lies, but 
to-day he wears the air of truth. 

"Ye shall be as gods, knowing 
good and evil," is his age-old 
promise; to-day he says, "Ye are 
gods and your will is law, for ye 
are beyond good and evil." Lib- 
erty, the light to live freely ami 
boldly, to pluck the fruit of the 
tree of knowledge and disregard 



ESSAYS IN LENT 33 

the rules of the garden as out- 
grown restrictions laid on children, 
are his lures. "Be yourself at all 
costs, " says the Superman, who is 
the latest incarnation of the evil 
spirit. "If you have an impulse, 
follow it; it is the law of your 
nature, and there is no other law." 

"If you want power or wealth, 
take it by fair means or foul; to 
the strong there is no right or 
wrong — all things are yours to use 
as you choose. If others stand in 
your way, push them aside or beat 
them down; all things are yours 
because you are strong." 

"Your passions are strong; 
gratify them; you have a right to 
the full and free expression of 



34 ESSAYS IX LENT 

your nature; marriage is a conces- 
sion to artificial conventions; you 
have attained freedom. Cast all 
restraint aside. If society is 
thrown into confusion and children 
are alighted by divorce, and 
impurity poisons social life at the 
fountain, do not hesitate to live 
your own life; you have a right to 
happiness. Take it." 

So the devil of evil talks to his 
victims to-day, profaning the 
great words freedom, love, and 
life, and making them mere 
synonyms for ahjcct bondage, 
lust, and hard, brutal selfishness; 
and the misery, disillusion, vul- 
garity, and tragedy that are the 
harvest of his lies arc written in 



ESSAYS IN LENT 35 

every newspaper. "There is no 
battle of life," he says, as he be- 
trays to dishonor and spiritual 
shame and death all those who 
believe him. 



THE DENIAL OF LIFE 



RT has often been said that 
the supreme issue in life 
is the existence of God. 
The real battle is the battle 
between faith and atheism. No 
man escapes this struggle; no man 
evades this issue. At bottom it is 
not a matter of confessions and 
creeds; it is a matter of the whole 
bent and drift of a man's life. 
There are atheists who affirm their 
faith in words, and there are 
believers who deny in words and 

86 



ESSAYS IN LENT 



believe profoundly in spirit and 
deed. The possibility of sin is 
involved in all moral life ; wherever 
character is possible sin is also 
possible; wherever there is free- 
dom every man must choose 
between atheism and faith. "The 
chance to sin is wrapped up in the 
very fact that we are men. We 
could not have the lofty hopes of 
heaven without having, too, the 
haunting fear of hell," said 
Phillips Brooks in a notable 
sermon. "And here," he added, "is 
the only real light we get upon the 
problem of evil. It is not con- 
ceivable that man should have the 
chance of being good without the 
other chance of being evil." 



ESSAYS IN LENT 



No man can escape the pos- 
sibility of sinning until he escapes 
from life itself. But this pos- 
sibility is not the evidence of the 
corruption of his nature; it is the 
price he pays for being a man and 
not an automaton, a mechanism 
without volition, imagination, the 
sublime capacity for faith, love, 
sacrifice. 

Life is a great adventure of the 
spirit, and there can be no adven- 
ture without danger; "our sins are 
born deep in the bosom of our 
chances." Here we come face to 
face witli the most terrible aspect 
of sin; all imagery of the spirit of 
evil is external and crude in the 
presence of the truth that it is the 



• ESSAYS IN LENT 39 

denial of God, the betrayal of the 
soul. As a father suffers with the 
son who has committed a crime 
and shares in spirit his shame and 
punishment, so God suffers for the 
sins of the world. The supreme 
agony of the cross was not pain 
of body but anguish of soul that 
men should strike down the hands 
that held out to them purity, free- 
dom, love, and peace, and choose 
hatred, corruption, and strife in 
their place. 

The boy who breaks the law of 
the school thinks he is asserting his 
freedom and defeating arbitrary 
authority, and does not know that 
he is cheating himself. The dis- 
cipline which he tries to evade was 



40 ESSAYS IN LENT 

not devised for the school; it 
embodies the larger experience of 
older men eager to fit him for 
tasks and opportunities which he 
neither foresees nor understands. 
Sin is always denial, not only of 
God, but of our divinest possibili- 
ties; in disobedience of the laws of 
God we bury our freedom instead 
of asserting it, narrow life instead 
of broadening it, and cheat our- 
selves instead of evading God. 

For sin is not so much a defiance 
of God as a denial of our own 
souls; it is not so much a violation 
of law as it is a betrayal of our- 
selves. Every newspaper confirms 
the truth of the awful doom, "The 
soul that sins, it shall die;" hut it 



ESSAYS IN LENT 41 

is not death by a process of law: 
it is suicide. That death is often 
so gradual that those to whom it 
is coming are unaware of it. 
Every denial of life, which is part 
of every denial of God, involves 
a lowering of the standards, a 
blurring of the lines between right 
and wrong, a coarsening of the 
nature, a deadening of the finer 
sensibilities, a blighting of that 
purity of heart which is the posses- 
sion of those who see God. It is 
one of the tragedies of an age of 
publicity that the violators of the 
higher standards, who defend 
themselves and others like them in 
the newspapers, do not realize how 
strikingly they confirm the sanctity 



42 ESSAYS IN LENT 

of the broken law by their uncon- 
scious revelation of the havoc 
already wrought in their own 
natures. 



VI 
THE PRICE OF THE SOUL 



HE health of society is 
being more rigorously 
guarded than ever be- 
fore. As fast as science discovers 
the sources of disease she lays 
upon us the duty of removing 
them. Drainage, sanitation, pure 
water and milk, good food, are no 
longer matters of choice; they are 
matters of necessity. Public health 
is a public duty; an epidemic of 
typhoid fever is a disgrace to a 

43 



44 ESSAYS IN LENT 

community; it is an evidence of 
criminal ignorance or criminal 
carelessness. The time is coming 
when death as the result of laxity 
of supervision or indifference will 
involve a penalty on the offending 
community. Health is an achieve- 
ment; it can be secured and j)re- 
served only by ceaseless vigilance. 
Society can exist only by sus- 
tained exertion of body, mind, and 
soul; the life of men in the world 
depends on sleepless fidelity and 
effort. Play is as much a part of 
life as work, but play is a refuge 
from work, a relaxation from the 
strain of attention it involves. 
The race will never be able to 
retire from activity and live on its 



ESSAYS IN LENT 45 

accumulated capital. The condi- 
tions of work will probably become 
easier; it is certain that they will 
be made to conform to a keener 
sense of justice. They will secure 
wider leisure, but they will never 
make idleness possible. If society 
ever attempts to sit with folded 
hands and give itself up to 
pleasure on the fortune be- 
queathed to it by its vigorous and 
tireless ancestors, it will go into 
bankruptcy of character and 
estate. 

No business can be so solidly 
founded, so wisely organized, that 
it will go on its successful way by 
its own momentum; it must be 
served by fresh ability, managed 



46 ESSAYS IX LENT 

with ever-renewed skill, or it will 
be overtaken by disaster. 

The Church cannot thrive on 
the traditions of a great past, 
preserve the reverence of the 
world by recalling and repeating 
the names of the saints, or serve 
the twentieth century by using 
slavishly the words and methods 
of the apostolic age. It must 
understand the conditions and 
temper of the men and women of 
to-day, it must have the consecra- 
tion of saintly lives in this 
generation, it must renew its youth 
in fresh vows and modern forma 
of activity. In every art sub- 
sidence of the creative spirit 
follows fast on loss of present 



ESSAYS IN LENT 47 

courage, faith, and confidence; the 
spirit of the masters lives, not in 
the copyists whose easels are set 
up in every art gallery, but in the 
works that throb with the vitality 
of to-day and are beautiful with 
the light of this morning. 

We are finding out in this 
country that democracy is not an 
end in itself but a method which 
demands more work and thought 
and devotion from more people 
than any other form of govern- 
ment. A perfect system of 
administration of public interests 
directed by weak, incompetent, 
and corrupt men would fail as 
disastrously as the most irrespon- 
sible oligarchy. In the whole 



48 ESSAYS IN LENT 

world nothing will do its work 
without constant oversight ex- 
cept some kinds of automatic 
machinery; and machine!'}' wears 
out and must be renewed. Vigi- 
lance is the price, not only of 
progress in society, but of health 
and safety. Men must not only 
guard hut renew their possessions. 
A man's character is determined 
by the habit he establishes of 
choosing the good or the evil 
thing; it is at stake every day: it 
must be reinforced every hour. In 
a weak moment, or a passing mood 
to which he surrenders his will, 
he may wreck it; the battle must 
begin again every morning, and 
ends only when night falls. How- 



ESSAYS IN LENT 49 

ever we may explain it, we cannot 
shut our eyes to the downward 
drift in society; a drift which can 
be overcoiBf3 only by resolute and 
sustained effort. The moment this 
effort is relaxed moral standards 
become blurred, men begin to 
degenerate, communities begin to 
decay. 

For society as for the in- 
dividual, moral disease and death 
follow fast every relaxation of 
moral effort. Society must fight 
hourly for its life, and for every 
man and woman the same struggle 
is appointed. The soldier who 
sleeps on sentry duty is a traitor, 
however patriotic his intentions 
may be; the best purpose in the 



50 ESSAYS IN LENT 

world will not help him when the 
line he was .set to guard is 
broken and the enemy Has pn 
through; he must not only mean 
well, he must keep awake. 

A soul is a priceless possession; 
no present standards of measure- 
ment can give us any real B< rise 
of its intrinsic value; it can be kept 
in safety only hy tireless vigilance. 



VIX 
GOOD FRIDAY; 



HE tragedies of life are 
not sickness and death; 
these are its passing 
shadows, its sorrows by the way, 
grievously heavy at the moment, 
but neither disintegrating nor 
weakening. The death which 
follows an act of sacrifice, of 
courage, of faith, opens a door 
through which a great light shines ; 
it may bring great sadness; it 
cannot bring the sense of futility 
which strikes all meaning out of 



52 ESSAYS IN LENT 

life, or the sense of the victory of 
evil which shrouds it in the gloom 
of eternal orphanage. Lincoln's 
death at the moment of emergence 
from that long anguish of soul 
was unspeakably sad: but the hour 
of his going was the beginning of 
a revelation of his spirit and 
service which is the most priceless 
possession of this Xation. When 
a man's life opens the door of 
hope for all time to come and 
lights the mysterious path of life 
as with a great torch, the sadness 
is for the hour, and the strengthen- 
ing of faith in service and love is 
a permanent addition to the wealth 
of humanity. 

That wealth is spiritual; nun 



ESSAYS IN LENT 5S 

have tried again and again to live 
by bread alone and have gone 
near to starvation, and then the 
bread has mercifully been taken 
from them and they have heard 
again the word of God and health 
and sanity have come back to 
them. There is no life-giving and 
life-sustaining power in wealth, 
comfort, ease; if these things are 
rightly used, they set men free for 
high endeavors and they make 
splendid service possible; but they 
cannot feed the spirit, and to try 
to live upon them is to starve. The 
events that strike our mortality 
are infinitely sad ; but the tragedies 
of life are those events that strike 
our immortality, that destroy 



64 ESSAYS IN LENT 

faith, weaken hope, blur the vision, 
and devitalize the will. The man 
who accidentally kills his fellow 
may bring grief and anguish to 
many; but the man who violates 
a sacred trust, breaks a holy vow, 
uses a good reputation to hide an 
evil life, strikes at the souls of his 
fellows. 

There are many kinds of sad- 
ness in life, but the tragedies are 
one and all rooted in the immorali- 
ties of the world. The hurricane 
and earthquake destroy the work 
of generations in a moment and 
bring widespread misery and 
death in their train; but they open 
the heart of the world, and 
sympathy and help flow like a 



ESSAYS IN LENT 55 

fertilizing tide over the devasta- 
tion. Strength does not fail, hope 
does not die, the flame of courage 
does not sink in the ashes of a final 
despair. Men begin at once to 
plan, to work, to look ahead to 
other homes and harvests; the 
foundations on which life rests 
have not been destroyed. 

The real possession of the race 
is neither wealth nor safety; it is 
faith in God. While that remains 
no catastrophe is final or fatal; 
when that goes, no prosperity has 
any value, sacrifice is futile, love 
is a mockery, life is a lie. Then 
the ultimate wisdom shrinks into 
the appalling words, "Let us eat 
and drink, for to-morrow we die." 



56 ESSAYS IN LENT 

It is easy to blur the edges of 
sin, and many men and women are 
deceiving themselves with the idea 
that divine laws, like human laws, 
can be evaded. The}' forget that 
divine laws are automatic; they 
are not imposed from without, but 
are wrought into our natures. 
They are so much a part of us 
that they need no external author- 
ity to enforce the penalties of 
disobedience. They can be neither 
evaded nor blurred. The identi- 
fication of sin with death would 
seem incredible if it rested solely 
on the authority of an oldfashioned 
book like the Bible; but it is the 
most modem fact reported by the 
daily newspapers. They repeat it 



ESSAYS IN LENT 57 

day after day with pitiful reitera- 
tion. 

The tragedy is played by new- 
actors, with variation of incident, 
but always with the same denoue- 
ment. First a faint blurring of 
the standards, followed by a little 
lowering of tone hardly percep- 
tible for a time. Then a dead- 
ening of moral sensitiveness, a 
fading of the vision of an ordered 
and noble world; a coarsening of 
taste, a loss of spiritual refine- 
ment, a vulgarization of the whole 
nature; then a growing skepticism 
of the presence of God in the 
world, of the reality of the soul, 
and of the distinction between 
right and wrong. Then indiffer- 



58 ESSAYS IX LENT 

ence to moral law, the craving for 
physical excitement and diversion, 

the loss of modesty and shame. 

These are they who weaken the 
hope of the world, blighi its 
promise, and destroy its capital of 
purity and strength. Their fall is 
the tragedy of the world; there is 
no other tragedy, for misfortune 
and calamity hurt the body, hut 
they who violate the laws of life 
harm the soul. They crucify the 
Christ again. 




VIII 

EASTER MORNING: THE 
VICTORY 

HE temptation in the 
desert came at the begin- 
ning of Christ's ministry, 
the opening of the tomb in the 
garden at the end; many months 
of teaching, healing, lonely fellow- 
ship with those who walked with 
him and yet were separated from 
him by a chasm of misunder- 
standing, lay between the hour of 
struggle in the solitude and the 
hour of victory in the garden; but 
one followed the other as in- 

59 



60 ESSAYS IX LENT 

evitably as the reaping follows the 

sowing. The resurrection was 
predicted by the rejection of evil; 
when Christ came hack from his 
vigil in the desert, he had already 
conquered sin and death. 

In the struggle through which 
he had passed the mortal nature 
had fought for supremacy with 
the immortal nature, the body had 
striven with the spirit, and the 
body had been defeated. Immor- 
tality triumphed over mortality as 
certainly in the desert as on the 
morning of the resurrection. The 
fight with death was won at the 
beginning, not at the end. of his 
career. If his followers had 
achieved at that moment the gift 



ESSAYS IN LENT 61 

of vision which came to them later, 
they would have seen him trans- 
figured and in companionship with 
the saints of their nation when he 
came to them from the mysterious 
and lonely struggle in the desert. 
Henceforth his life moved like a 
beam of light through the darkness 
and confusion of the world. There 
was no uncertainty in that brief 
and crowded career; there was 
great sorrow, the awful burden of 
the sin of the world was laid on 
that stainless and loving soul, lone- 
liness enfolded him like the air he 
breathed, he was sometimes almost 
overborne by weariness, hours of 
anguish awaited for him not only 
in the garden of Gethsemane and 



62 ESSAYS IN LENT 

on Calvary but in many an un- 
recorded place by the way; but 
there was no faltering, no hesita- 
tion, no groping for the path 
through the shadows of misunder- 
standing and the darkness of 
death. The battle was won once 
for all in the desert; the spirit 
triumphed; sin and death were 
banished from that victorious 
career. When Christ came forth 
from the desert to take up the 
work which he was sent into the 
world to accomplish, immortality 
had already taken the sting from 
death and victory from the grave. 
Those who loved him were to 
see him radiantly alive on Easter 
morning, for lie was to bring life 



ESSAYS IN LENT 63 

and immortality to light, and the 
brightness that streamed from the 
empty tomb has transformed the 
graveyards in which they who are 
sown in weakness shall be raised 
in power; but it is the spirit, not 
the body, which is immortal, and 
spiritual things must be spiritually 
discerned. The evidence of im- 
mortality is wrought into the very 
structure of our natures. If they 
who resist evil rise not from the 
dead, to recall the Apostle of the 
resurrection, then are they of all 
men most miserable; for their 
victory is futile and barren. The 
victory of the body brings its 
rewards in physical instincts fol- 
lowed to their end, physical desires 



64 ESSAYS IN LENT 

gratified, passion laid to rest by 
free expression, the love of 
pleasure satisfied. These are all 
perishable rewards, for the body is 
perishable; but they arc real and 
tangible. The man who yields to 
the temptations of the body gets 
what he pays for; and the physical 
life fulfills itself and sinks at last 
like a flame which, in consuming 
the fuel that feeds it, accomplishes 
its purpose. 

But the triumphs of the spirit 
are futile and empty if it does not 
fulfill itself in activities for which 
there is neither time nor room here. 
If the discipline of sorrow and 
pain and weariness do nothing 
more than train to purity, obedi- 



ESSAYS IN LENT 



ence, and unselfishness a spirit 
which is never to give these divine 
qualities free scope in conditions 
that foster and aid them, then life 
is as meaningless and futile as 
education would be if it prepared 
us for tasks, duties, and achieve- 
ments which had no existence. To 
impose on children the long and 
arduous discipline of school, col- 
lege, and university, and tell them 
at the end that there is no room, 
place, or time to use that which 
they had patiently gained through 
long years, would be the last 
sinister irony of a super-deity who 
was a god without divinity. 

The unescapable tests to which 
all men are subjected, the struggle 



66 ESSAYS IN LENT 

to keep the soul alive, the daily 
assault of temptation, the mora] 
rigor of life, arc the premonitions 
of the splendid opportunity of the 

spirit; as the hard lessons, the nil 3 
and work of the schoolroom arc 
premonitions of the life which is to 
open wide to training', talent, and 
character. 

Every temptation resisted 
strengthens and invigorates the 
spirit, and by the very vitality 
which it feeds and deepens makes 
immortality the more inevitable. 
Every victory of the body over the 
spirit takes something from the 
life of the spirit, and blurs the 
great vision of completed strength 

for growth and peace and love 



ESSAYS IN LENT 67 

which we call heaven; every vic- 
tory of the spirit over the body 
makes that vision more real and 
clear. 

The open door of the empt} r 
tomb is a symbol of that escape 
from sin and death, that present 
entrance into life eternal, which 
makes every pure and noble life 
an assurance of immortality. 
There are those about us whose 
lives exhale a sweetness not of this 
world, and whose spirits have no 
kinship with death. In them the 
immortal has subdued the mortal, 
and they have already entered into 
the peace and rest that are the 
fruits of the final victory. 

THE END 



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